


Caught in the Middle

by Merfilly



Category: Rizzoli & Isles, Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Challenge: A Ficathon Walks Into A Bar, Crossover, Gen, Near Death Experience
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-03
Updated: 2010-10-03
Packaged: 2017-10-12 11:54:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/124564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merfilly/pseuds/Merfilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jane's dreaming...right?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Caught in the Middle

She dreams often. Sometimes it's even good, thoughts of Maura and Frost and Korsak all being themselves, or of Frankie and Ma and Dad. Sometimes, she dreams of walking Jo Friday while Maura goads her turtle {"tortoise!"} along.  
   
Other times, when she dreams she sees _him_ there. Hoyt, laughing and touching her with the scalpel, or worse, as she's powerless again, crippled by blades through her hands, is the worst of the dreams that come.  
   
Then she starts dreaming of the bar, of sitting there after Hoyt, of drinking beer with Korsak after her hands healed, working through it all. Those dreams are comforting, reminding her that she is strong still. She moved forward, kept doing what she had wanted to do with her life.  
   
"Oh you think you managed to do it all already?"  
   
The voice wafts around her, and the sound of everyone in the _Dirty Robber_ hushes.  Jane looks around, looks at the changing scene of her table where Maura should be sipping a spritzer or other frou-frou drink, and feels a vast disorientation.  
   
"Who the hell are you, and what did you put in my beer?" Jane demands, right hand slipping down to the comforting weight of her shield, prepared to tell this... weirdo to lose it or face public harassment charges.  
   
He's not too tall, black hair and eyes nearly as dark even if they look unreal in the lighting here in the bar. He's clean-cut, but his clothes.... Jane wonders when the RenFaire rolled into town, and that accent has got to be fake. No one talks with that heavy an accent unless they're faking it, right?  
   
"The beer, the bar, you, me? None of it is real. It's all just spiritual alchemy, translating where you truly are into a demesnes you may understand with your pitiful mortal mind."  
   
Jane's jaw goes hard as she hears the insult, and she shifts free of the table to stand, using her not inconsiderable height as a woman, the brawn of her well-honed physique, to intimidate this fop of a masquerading nuisance.  
   
"Listen here," she begins, but he whips a hand up in a pointed gesture for silence, his eyes flashing inhumanely red for a moment. Jane literally cannot speak, and she feels very heavy, weighted down, in all her limbs.  
   
"Your time here is fleeting. Mine, eternal, or at least until I have appeased whatever powers took offense to me choosing to outwit the laws of mortality," the being snaps at her, a touch of insane hubris in his words.  When he ceases speaking, normalcy encroaches on Jane's mind and body, except now she knows this is not quite the real world. She's beginning to suspect it's not even a proper dream, because this man is like no one she's ever met before...beyond the flash in his eyes even when they are dark of a removal from humanity. That, she's seen before. That is Hoyt, and every other sociopathic killer.  
   
"Who the hell are you? What creep-tastic dream is this?" Jane pushes at her own mind, trying to figure out what this is, if it was like with Mathias making her see something she should have caught.  
   
"Why are all you mortals so beneath my efforts!?!" The strange man throws his hands up in histrionic dismay at her.  "Listen! You are caught in the middle of life and death, trapped here with me, as I have been ever since I found my true heir and chose the time of my death."  
   
"Blah blah you you you... blah blah," Jane says with a roll of her eyes.  "What are you trying to actually say?!"  The uneasy feeling that she knows, that she's blocking something important in her own mind comes to her as the man shifts his body aggressively.  
   
"You evidently did something that challenges the Fates' choice on when you die," he sneers at her. "So now you hover, between life and death....and you will eventually die, unless you actively fight to return to the realm of the living. They leave these things to me to explain for you pathetic mortals, to attone for my deeds!"  
   
Jane wants to snap back she's a good Catholic girl who doesn't believe in this mumbo-jumbo, but then again, she shouldn't have been able to reach a conclusion Maura had not based on the dream of a dead boy.  
   
What had she...  
   
 _Screaming, frantic, need for them to act, knowing they won't....take the choice away; she's going to be dead no matter what; he'd never let her go, not when he can make a life threatening injury in her to slow the pursuit...have to, for Frankie...forgive me, God, forgive me Maura, but Frankie needs..._  
   
...done? Her eyes go wide , and he smirks in triumph.  
   
"Now you know." He turns to leave.  
   
"Wait!" she demands. "How do I..." He's gone, though, and the bar noises are all around her. "...get back?"


End file.
